Major cruise brands to adopt Interpol I-Checkit security screening

A significantly enhanced passenger security screening system powered by international policing collective Interpol will be gradually rolled out across more than 100 cruise ships owned and operated by Carnival Corporation and its house of ten brands around the world, the company announced today.

The ten brands include Carnival Cruise Line, Princess Cruises, Holland America Line, Cunard, P&O Cruises Australia, Seabourn, P&O Cruises UK, AIDA Cruises, Costa Cruises and Fathom – seven of which see part of their fleet either sailing permanently or visiting Australia regularly. Carnival Corporation’s house of brands together carry more than 11 million people annually.

A newly signed partnership between Carnival Corporation and Interpol will see the police group’s ‘I-Checkit’ system installed around the world at cruise ports visited by its brands. As part of passenger boarding processes, once in place the system be used to screen travel documents including passports and other government issued identification against Interpol’s global ‘Stolen and Lost Travel Documents’ (SLTD) database, which contains more than 69 million records from 175 countries.

Real-time queries will be able to be carried out both prior to and at the time of passenger embarkation. The process is highly secure and does not actually access or transmit personal data over any online server at any point during the search.

Interpol’s SLTD system is already in place at hundreds of major airports around the world and heavily used by many of the world’s biggest airlines and aviation groups. Today’s move will see one single security system put in place for all ten of Carnival Corporation’s brands.

The company-wide adoption follows an I-Checkit pilot program which has been carried out on four Princess Cruises ships over the last three months. In this trial, more than 34,000 documents were scanned as passengers embarked the four Princess ships for their cruises. The purpose of the trial was to determine whether the system can be used to adequately enhance security for passengers travelling on cruise ships.

Onboard security won’t change, but Carnival Corp said it was pioneering a new global standard in cruise ship security.

A phased roll-out of the system will now take place, however no timeline has been detailed on when each brand, port or region will see the technology installed.

Interpol operational support and analysis director Michael O’Connell said the I-Checkit pact with Carnival will provide an additional layer of security for cruising by creating an international standard for security screening.